Being Obese Might Be Good For You, New Study Affirms

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NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - In a review of almost 100 past studies covering nearly three million people, researchers found that being overweight or slightly obese was linked to about a 6 percent lower risk of dying, compared to people considered "normal weight."

The idea that being somewhat overweight could be linked to better health has been dubbed the obesity paradox, even though actual obesity is generally not associated with the apparent "benefit."

"This is actually the common finding," said the new study's lead author Katherine Flegal, a senior scientist from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Hyattsville, Maryland.

Her work, she said, confirms what previous analyses found - a link between being somewhat overweight and having a lower risk of death.

The paradox, as scientists have called it, is based on past findings that suggest overweight and obese people - even those with additional health problems - live longer than their thinner counterparts (see Reuters Health article of August 7, 2012 here: reut.rs/N0YvOK).

For the new analysis, the researchers, who published their results in the Journal of the American Medical Association, used data from past studies, and classified the risks according to BMI categories accepted by the World Health Organization and the U.S. National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.

Those organizations consider a BMI between 18.5 and 24.9 normal weight, between 25 and 29.9 overweight, and 30 or above obese. They further subdivide the obese category, though - with a BMI between 30 and 34.9 designated grade-1 obesity, and anything above 35 grades 2 or 3.

The researchers reviewed databases of medical research and found 97 studies that looked at weight and mortality risk. Combined, Flegal and her colleagues had information on about 2.9 million people from around the world and 270,000 deaths.

Being merely overweight was linked to a 6 percent decreased risk of death compared to a normal weight person, while being slightly (grade 1) obese was linked to a 5 percent lower risk.

The study cannot say why there seems to be a link between being overweight or slightly obese and a lower risk of death.

"We don't have the data to look at the physiological mechanisms, and that wasn't our goal," said Flegal.

"Our contribution - I hope - is just to summarize it to show what other articles are showing," she said.

SOURCE: bit.ly/JOTmp1 Journal of the American Medical Association, online December 31, 2012.

PR representative for Drunk Whiskeyguy.

Overweight people are immune to many types of risky health conditions, such as STDs (cause they aren't fucking, get it?), getting hit by a truck while jogging, starvation, people killing them out of envy/jealousy, skin disease (they never take their shirt off at the beach), and so on.